Maverick Priest Throws Out Challenge

January 12, 1991|By CHARLES CLAREY Staff Writer

WILLIAMSBURG — In a rousing and charismatic speech Friday to more than 670 students at the Campus Center ballroom at the College of William and Mary, Bishop George A. Stallings Jr. said blacks must take charge of their lives to determine their destiny and the destiny of their descendants.

"We as African Americans must come to take full ownership of our own destiny," Stallings said, "moved by the genius of our culture to achieve full spiritual, economical, political, cultural, educational and psychological maturity. We as African Americans refuse any longer to let any cultural or ethnic group name or claim for ourselves what only we can do."

Stallings, an excommunicated Roman Catholic priest who founded the Imani Temple African-American Catholic Congregation, spoke during the opening session of the fifth annual National Black Student Leadership Development Conference, which brought students from colleges nationwide to look at their African roots with an eye toward the future.

The theme of the three-day conference is the Art and Science of Bridge Building. The theme comes from a quotation from 19th-century journalist and black leader Frederick Douglass: "We must construct bridges as well as pass over them."

Stallings was interrupted often by applause.

Throughout his speech, he referred to barriers that prevent blacks from bridging the gap of dependency to reach self-determination.

"If you are still shackled by the chains and images of psychological slavery," Stallings said, "then it is inconceivable how you can break through, how you can dismantle the white-world domination."

He quoted the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., who said the measure of a man or woman is not where one stands in moments of comfort or convenience, but where one stands at times of challenge and controversy.

"Many of us as African Americans seek out the comfort and convenient road; we don't want to shake up the dust; we don't want to rattle the cage," Stallings said. "You cannot sell yourself out to accommodate the masses."

Some students said they agree with Stallings' statement and said he gives some good reasons why black leaders are not as plentiful now as in the 1960s and before.

"You don't see powerful or strong leaders as before," said Tonya Austin, a performing arts major at Mary Washington College in Fredericksburg. "A lot of people are satisfied where they are and are not striving to get any further than that."

In breaking from the Roman Catholic Church, Stallings called its leaders racist. He was excommunicated in February, seven months after founding his own church, which now has congregations in Baltimore, Philadelphia, New Orleans and Norfolk.

The church doesn't require celibacy of its priests, allows birth control and ordains both men and women. It advocates life but doesn't condemn women who have abortions, said Stallings, who is engaged and plans to marry this spring.

The church is rooted in the concept that Jesus was black, he said.

Stallings acknowledged that some parishioners have returned to the Roman Catholic church after initially following him to the African American Catholic congregation.

"Our greatest last challenge is to deprogram and to destroy the manacles of indoctrination. That will convince African American Catholics that it is possible to be saved outside the Roman Catholic Church, and to ingrain in them it is not denomination, but salvation," he said. "Once we see that we have won them over."